NFS stands for
N
etwork
F
ile
S
ystem, and is a way to share files between
machines as if they were on your local hard drive. Linux can be both an
NFS server and an NFS client, which means that it can
export
filesystems to other systems, and
mount
filesystems exported from other machines.
Use the
mount
command to mount an NFS filesystem
from another machine:
mkdir
/mnt/local
# Only required if /mnt/local doesn't exist
mount
bigdog:/mnt/export
/mnt/local
|
In this command, bigdog is the hostname of the NFS fileserver,
/mnt/export
is the filesystem that bigdog is
exporting, and
/mnt/local
is a directory on my
local machine where we want to mount the filesystem. After the
mount
command runs (and if we have the proper
permissions from
bigdog
) we can enter
ls
/mnt/local
and get a listing of the files in
/mnt/export
on bigdog.
The file that controls what filesystems you wish to export is
/etc/exports
. Its format is:
directory
hostname
(
options
)
|
the
(
options
)
are
optional. For example:
/mnt/export
speedy.redhat.com
|
would allow speedy.redhat.com to mount
/mnt/export
, but:
/mnt/export
speedy.redhat.com(ro)
|
would just allow speedy to mount
/mnt/export
read-only.
Each time you change
/etc/exports
, you must tell
the NFS daemons to examine it for new information. One simple way to
accomplish this is to just stop and start the daemons:
/etc/rc.d/init.d/nfs stop
/etc/rc.d/init.d/nfs start
|
The following will also work:
killall -HUP rpc.nfsd rpc.mountd
|
See the following man pages for more details: nfsd(8), mountd(8), and
exports(5). Another good reference is
Managing NFS and NIS
Services
, by Hal Stern, published by O'Reilly &
Associates.
